Another Pan

by Daniel Nayeri

  Wendy shrugged, also too curious to care. “We’re wearing gloves.”

  After that, neither of them pushed the topic of setting the book aside.

  “I wish I could read this,” said John after another few minutes. He shut the book and opened it again, somewhere in the middle. “See these titles? They must be the names of the hours.”

  “How do you know?” Wendy asked.

  “That’s not so hard to know.” John shrugged. Then he pulled out a piece of notebook paper from his pocket. “See?” He held it out to her, and she opened it. Inside were words — English letters in her father’s handwriting — that read like gibberish.

  “They’re the Egyptian names of the hours,” said John. “For some reason Dad’s been pretty obsessed with them lately.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken Dad’s notes,” said Wendy, looking toward the door. John shrugged again. Wendy began to read aloud from the paper, sounding out the strange words one at a time.

  “Shesat-maket-neb-s,” she read. “That’s the name of the second hour. Why don’t they just call it two o’clock?”

  “Shut up. You’re not even pronouncing it right.” John made to grab for the paper. But Wendy was too quick. She pushed him away with one hand and kept reading.

  “The third hour is called thentent-baiu. At least that one’s shorter.”

  “Fine,” said John. “You have fun with your little list, and I’ll just sit here and read the original in ancient Egyptian.” He cradled the book in his lap.

  “Urt-em-sekhemu-set,” Wendy read, enunciating the name of the fourth hour. As soon as the last syllable had left her lips, something stirred in the Marlowe basement. A tremor passed between John and Wendy and they both leaped back.

  “Did you feel that?” said John.

  Wendy laughed nervously. “It’s a creepy old basement. It’s probably just someone banging around upstairs. . . . Let’s finish up, OK?”

  “Yeah, one sec,” said John. He was trying to read the title page, based on the very little he knew of Egyptian lettering. As he brushed the dust off the book, the corner of a page snapped off in his hand.

  Wendy let out a little scream. “John, Dad will kill you! Do you know how much it would cost to —?”

  “Stop distracting me!” John said. He tried to fit the corner back on the page. But then they noticed something changing. The ink on the page began to fade, until there was nothing there for John to decipher.

  “Put it away, John.” Wendy’s voice trembled as she spoke. “Just put it away and let’s go.” But John didn’t say a word. His gaze was fixed on the blank page of the book, and he motioned for her to come closer. She leaned tentatively across him, holding her breath. Words, in English letters, were appearing on the page, faint and unreadable at first and then stronger and stronger, so that they could have been printed off a modern printer.

  “What . . . what’s it doing? John, what’s it doing?”

  John’s face was pale. He looked the way he used to just before he was about to throw up at someone’s birthday party. Wendy thought for a second about pulling the book off his lap. “Well?” said Wendy. “Read it. What’s it say?”

  John pulled Wendy by her sleeve so that they could read it together.

  You speak truly: this fourth hour of Egypt’s night

  Open the gates and enter here

  Next to the final word appeared a black symbol, the Eye of Ra, which both John and Wendy recognized. They were silent for another moment. John moved to turn the page, but Wendy grabbed his hand. “I think we’re supposed to open something.”

  John’s eyes sparkled. “So you do realize that we’re about to open the door to the freaking underworld, right?”

  “OK. Don’t have a nerdgasm,” said Wendy, faking bravado. “It doesn’t really lead to anything. It’s a trick. Don’t you want to know if someone’s messing with Dad’s exhibit?”

  It took only a second for John to be convinced. “OK, fine, what do we do next?”

  Wendy was silent. John looked at the book and asked again, “What next?”

  “John,” said Wendy, one eyebrow raised, “it’s a book. It’s not gonna start talking to you. Gimme that.” She snatched the book from him. She read slowly, all the while chewing one nail nervously.

  A barely perceptible tremor ran through Wendy’s fingers. Otherwise, everything was exactly the same. They swiveled around on their haunches, clinging close to each other, wondering what horrors they had unleashed. But nothing happened. The Marlowe basement was still the Marlowe basement. The exhibit was in the same state as before. And the book sat, still and harmless, in John’s lap.

  Neither John nor Wendy noticed the minuscule detail, the tiny alteration that occurred in their basement hideaway almost at the same moment as the appearance of the message in the book. Silently, it waited there, during all the minutes they spent trying to figure out the next step, while they passed the book back and forth between them, and while Wendy read and reread the passage. It took Wendy several minutes to notice it, and she only did so after a second and then a third glance around the room. A barely perceptible etching of the Eye of Ra, no bigger than a quarter, appeared above the nearest door, the one leading to the janitor’s broom closet. Its elegant curls shone coal-black and fierce, boring deep into the wooden door. Wendy approached, thinking at first that it was some sort of projection or hologram. She looked around for its source, but then, as she came closer, she saw that it was embedded into the door, its creases branded on and singed like scorched firewood.

  As she drew closer, John got up and followed. They stood in front of the door, unable to decide, their mouths too dry to articulate all the possibilities that lay beyond the broom closet. Finally, Wendy said, “We might as well open it and see. Hold on to my hand.”

  John looked behind to make sure Simon wasn’t there (since he wasn’t about to let his sister hold his hand like a little kid).

  “OK, ready,” he said finally, grabbing hold of Wendy’s hand and squinting his eyes into a ready-for-anything frown. Wendy pulled open the door.

  “I don’t get it,” spat John.

  Brooms. Brooms and buckets and an old toilet. That was all they saw in the tiny room. They looked at each other, puzzled. John dropped Wendy’s hand and rolled his eyes. He threw his arms in the air and began pacing. “That’s it? So this is what —?”

  And then he was gone. Vanished in mid-sentence. One step inside the little room and John had disappeared. Wendy was about to scream, but a pang of instinct kept her silent. Without wasting another second, she took a step into the broom closet.

  Wendy expected to fall a long way down some black hole and land hard. So when her feet prematurely hit an ordinary stone step, she lost her footing and stumbled right into her brother, whose mouth was hanging open. He was standing on the step above her, on a patch of stringy green lichen. The first thought that went through Wendy’s mind was that they had lost their way back, that they were forever trapped here. She whipped around frantically, her heavy breaths almost too loud in the perfect silence of this place. But when she turned, there it was, the same glowing black Eye of Ra that had appeared on the door, now hanging in midair behind her, in the exact spot from which she had emerged. She took John’s arm and approached the eye, inching closer until it was above her. Beyond the eye she saw stone pillars and more winding steps leading up and down all around them, but Wendy guessed that this didn’t mean anything. After all, beyond that invisible curtain in the broom closet they had seen brooms and buckets. In one quick motion, she thrust her hand into the space past the eye. Her arm was gone, cut off at the exact plane that contained the charred black symbol. There was Wendy, just standing there with a bloodless stump and empty space where her arm should be. John screamed, his voice reverberating through the space behind them. Wendy pulled her arm back. “OK, at least we know how to get back.”

  “Look what’s over here,” John said, pulling Wendy away from the invisible door and toward on
e of the many sun-bleached staircases leading downward into a black space beneath their feet. “I might be going nuts here, but does all this look a little familiar?”

  Wendy shrugged. She had never seen this place before, but she did get that strange feeling of familiarity when she looked around her. The columns had a cluttering effect — not all that different from the basement they had just left. The pillars looked strangely similar to the pillars holding up the basement staircase — though the ones here were much bigger and greater in number. They were made of mud, hardly the elegant pillars of the Marlowe School. And the steps . . . the steps were the most prominent feature here, just as they were in the Marlowe basement. Except here, they all led downward, deeper into this strange world, instead of upward into the Marlowe School.

  Looking around, Wendy could see now that the space they stood in had exactly the same angles and proportions as the basement, though it was definitely bigger. And just like in the Marlowe basement, the stacks were so tall that they formed a trail, exactly like the winding path the janitor had cleared around each stack of junk.

  Wendy looked up, but there was no sun in the gray expanse overhead — no sun, no stars, and no clouds, so that she couldn’t tell if it was day or night here. She noticed then that the sky wasn’t a sky at all, but gray rock. She felt confined, as though they were breathing borrowed air. Were they underneath Marlowe? Were they still in the basement? There was something intriguing about the labyrinth that extended out from where they stood, the way it continued on past her line of vision, toward the unknown spaces beyond this eerie clone basement. But then, it couldn’t lead far. The whole place felt like a giant stone prison. It’s like the inside of a tomb, Wendy thought.

  Wendy motioned to John, and they started walking along another set of steps. They drew closer to the maze, which didn’t seem at all like a part of the fake basement now. In fact, it was as if the room with the pillars and stairs was a part of it — a colossal snakelike labyrinth with no end. “As long as we know how to get back,” said John, “it should be OK.” They quickly walked past another set of steps that descended into the oblivion below. They avoided the temptation of the stairs, choosing instead to explore the columned space, with its unruly shrubs and discarded spires. It was dark, and they couldn’t see the entire space the way they might be able to in the Marlowe basement. They fumbled around for another few minutes before they spotted a small circular lake in a clearing a few yards away. It started underneath a pillar and continued on into the bushy maze beyond what should have been the end of the basement. The lake was an icy blue, but sparks were flying from it. Every few seconds the water flashed and a giant flame licked the air above the lake, floating up toward a nonexistent sky, died out, and returned to the water.

  Wendy drew a breath.

  “What?” John asked. But Wendy couldn’t explain. It seemed so crazy to tell her brother that the lake reminded her of the puddle in the basement — like a larger, darker, more foreboding version of it, this time with huge sparks instead of the tiny flashes of light from exposed electric wires. Are we still in the basement? Wendy wondered. Are we underneath it? Maybe this lake is what caused the basement leak.

  But then something else caught Wendy’s attention. She took a step into the maze beyond the periphery of the twin basement, John following on her heels. Wendy walked tentatively, making mental notes of exactly which turns they took. Five minutes later, when they were already past the lake, they caught sight of a far-off building. Wendy whispered to John, reciting from their father’s lecture. “A tomb made of clay and stone with five pointed pillars and a pyramid base —”

  “Painted a golden color since he had no gold of his own,” John finished for her.

  “Oh. My. God,” whispered Wendy.

  “We have to go there,” said John. “We have to! Do you realize what we could find? That’s the castle from the first legend!”

  “No way. No way I’m going farther through this maze, risking getting lost just to find some old bones. Forget it. I want to go back.” Something inside Wendy was absolutely certain that she could never cross the whole maze. She turned around. The pillared space was still close behind them. Something told her that the castle in the distance was much farther away than it looked.

  Frightened, they turned to go. Almost as if the labyrinth had heard them, a shadow passed over the maze. A cold breeze blew through Wendy’s hair, and she stiffened, as if she had been brushed by an icy hand. The rocky sky seemed to lower and began to turn into a darker, more menacing gray. Above the tiny gold-painted castle pyramid, Wendy saw a shadow pass to and fro.

  “OK, this is scary. Let’s go,” she said. As they made their way back through the maze (two rights, two lefts, another right), past the fiery lake, and back toward the pillared space, the shadows above them grew darker. They hurried toward the eye that signaled the invisible door. Wendy pushed John forward. “You go through first,” she said. John was chewing his lips nervously. He let go of Wendy’s hand and disappeared into the empty space beyond.

  John stepped into the broom closet for only a second. He dove back through the gate just as suddenly and practically fell on top of Wendy. “What are you doing?” Wendy asked. “Let’s get out of here!”

  John’s face was as white as a blank sheet of paper. He began muttering. “Simon . . . Simon’s snooping around out there. He might have seen me. If he comes in here —”

  “We can’t stay here forever,” she said, looking up at the shadows gathering up above. “How do we know when he’s gone?”

  John thought for a moment, and then he jumped up. “I’ve got it,” he said. He dug deep into his pocket and took out a ballpoint pen.

  “What are you doing with that?” Wendy asked. The shadows above them were becoming grayer. Wendy’s legs shook as she began to smell a stench coming from over her head. Everything was getting darker now. Looking at the fire-spewing lake, just barely visible in the far corner of the space, Wendy glimpsed a solid figure, the shadow of someone wrapped in thick cloths, passing back and forth, inspecting the ground they had walked. Once in a while, the figure stopped and bent its head, as if it were a person coughing.

  “You’ll see,” said John as he unscrewed the bottom of the pen and tossed out the ink tube and the ballpoint. He held the hollow, strawlike casing of the pen and carefully approached the invisible door. He pushed one end of the straw just inside the hidden barrier so that a tiny circle from the tube’s end was inside the broom closet and most of its length was with John and Wendy, in this other world.

  “Genius,” said Wendy as she heard Simon’s footsteps through the makeshift periscope. They stood there holding the pen tube for one or two minutes, all the while watching as the ominous figure overhead drew closer, darker. They clutched each other as they heard a dark whisper, somewhere far off. The air was cold now and more confining. Shadows were still hovering above, darkening everything.

  Simon’s steps grew louder. John got on one knee and held the end of the tube to his eye so that he could see Simon on the other side of the invisible barrier. Simon was going door to door through the basement, opening closets and bathrooms, peeking under tables.

  “He definitely saw me for a second,” said John, watching the curious way Simon searched the basement, like a mental patient trying to prove that his hallucinations were real. Then Simon came to the broom closet, whose door was already ajar. He peered inside. Through the pen tube John could see his huge face. John drew a breath.

  John’s pen quivered. Across the curtain separating Marlowe from the underworld maze, they were face-to-face now — Simon in one dimension, staring into a broom closet full of mops, his face only an inch or two away from John’s (only an inch from stumbling into this career-making secret), and John and Wendy in another dimension, their pen-tube barely poking through the barrier, its tip lightly touching Simon’s sweater. They held their breath, hoping that Simon would not lean forward, praying that he would not feel the sharp circle on his
belly or see the eye above the door.

  “Why doesn’t he go away?” Wendy whispered.

  “He’s probably trying to figure out where we went,” said John, putting his thumb over the end of the tube so Simon couldn’t hear. “Just hush and we won’t get into trouble.”

  “No.” Wendy shook her head. “I bet he would be all over this if he knew. He’s one of those weasel résumé padders who’d totally screw Dad if he could.”

  Wendy looked up again at the impending darkness and began grinding her teeth nervously. For a moment, she thought she might just jump back into the broom closet and take her chances with Simon. Who cares if she got into trouble or if Simon the sleaze took all the credit for a discovery that her father had been so close to making? At least she’d be alive.

  Wendy turned around. The figure by the lake was no longer pacing. It stood by the water, its hooded head and female body reminding her of the statues of the death god from the exhibit. Again it seemed to cough, and the humanness of the sound was frightening. The figure was looking right at her, and even from this distance, Wendy felt the force of a deep-blue left eye that she couldn’t see.

  Just then, through the pen tube, they saw Simon squint suspiciously, turn, and march out of the basement. The sound of his footsteps faded away. Then, overhead, they heard a voice. A thick, raspy voice echoing through the labyrinth, whispering words in a dead tongue. John and Wendy threw themselves into the broom closet and stumbled out. They lay on the floor, panting, for only a second before they grabbed their backpacks and started running out of the basement.

  They didn’t make it far. Simon was waiting just above the banister, on his way back down to check on the exhibit.

  “What are you two up to?” he asked, his eyes narrow slits.

  “We’re done for today,” said Wendy. She glanced at the now-ominous puddle near the staircase. “We’re leaving.”

  “Why are you all flushed like that?” Simon asked.